Harriott had listened closely for a while to Constable Horton’s narrative, but soon had to turn away to face the window. The maul was exerting an awful compulsion on him. The shape of the murderous instrument sits on his eye like the imprint of a midday Indian sun. Horton’s calm description of the maul’s barbaric usage has turned this particular tool into something Viking and appalling. Through the window Harriott watches a group of lumpers dragging bags of coal along a wharf, and suddenly envies them their work. He remembers sailing, remembers the activity of the hands and the brain, and the inability to think of anything else, the needlessness of anxiety when all your brain wanted to do was to pass your hands over and over each other in an endless whirr of doing.
He turns back to the room. Horton is still looking at the maul, but he does not touch it. He is concerned with not disturbing the—oh dear God—the evidence which still clings to the flat surface of the mallet-shaped side of the maul, a nightmare of blood and hair and other matter.
Constable Horton is, to Harriott’s eyes at least, an exceptional man but an occasionally rather odd one, and he is displaying his capacity for oddness right at this moment, pondering the maul, eating it with his eyes, searching for some kind of message on its hard iron extremities. Horton is inspecting the maul, as if a close examination could render up information contained within it. As usual, Harriott finds himself to be vaguely uncomfortable with this. It seems somehow wrong to pour such intense attention into such a terrible instrument, as if by doing so the inspector could somehow be infected with the evil that wielded the thing in the first place. But Harriott has also come to realize that Constable Horton’s attentiveness yields results. The man can discover answers to unfathomable questions which no other man in the River Thames Police Office can. Harriott only recently came up with a word to describe what it is Horton does. It is detection.
Of course the questions for which Harriott and Horton have been seeking answers have normally been of a mercantile nature. A cargo gone missing. A ship sabotaged. A barge raided. Needless to say there have been murders over the thirteen years since Harriott first formed the River Police Office. When sitting down to dinner at Whitehall and Westminster, Harriott has heard Wapping described as the worst place in the world. Powerful and wealthy men have questioned him remorselessly, eager for every nugget of awfulness he can provide on the subject of the human monsters over whom he watches. Harriott always obliges, a natural showman—as a younger man he had once promenaded a herd of Russian sheep through Lord Holland’s dining room just to raise a chuckle from the assembled ladies. That memory now pops into his head, another pleasant sliver of reminiscence from a more gilded time, and he turns again to see Horton inspecting the accursed instrument, and considers that this crime is not of a mercantile nature at all. It has a flavor of something else entirely.
“How much sleep have you had, Horton?” Harriott’s voice is port-and-cigars gruff, but he finds himself speaking almost for the sake of saying something. Why in heaven should he worry about how much sleep the man has had? There have been savage murders. Something must be done. Sleep should be the last thing on his mind.
But I am an old man . . .
Constable Horton glances up at him, and Harriott sees that the man has barely registered the question. There is an absent look in his mind; the brain is whirring behind the forehead. Horton is busy—now, how had the man described it to Harriott once? Oh, yes. He is busy making connections.
“I haven’t slept, sir,” Horton replies. “I wanted to get the details down on paper for you by first thing this morning. I can sleep later.”
Ah yes. The young man of action. I remember him.
“But your wife. Abigail, isn’t it? She will be concerned about you.”
Horton does not reply.
“And no one from Shadwell was at the scene of these murders?”
“Not that I saw, sir, no.”
“But it’s their area, not ours.”
“Indeed, sir. Odd.”
“Not really. They don’t have the same caliber of men up there as we do, Horton.”
Harriott puffs out his chest at this in a military manner, but his officer says nothing to the compliment. He continues to gaze at the hellish maul. Harriott grows exasperated with himself and with the unheeding intensity of his officer. He slaps the table with his knuckle, and Constable Horton perceptibly starts. The old man places his fingers in the pockets of his waistcoat and turns back to the window, forcing himself to be businesslike. No more daydreaming, Harriott. Get on with it, whoever’s jurisdiction it is.
“So, we have four murders,” he says. “Two adults, a shop boy, and a baby.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Notable elements of the murders: their savagery, the small window of time the murderers had in which to undertake them, and the fact that nothing is apparently missing from the premises.”
“Nothing that we’ve been able to ascertain, sir, no.”
“Witnesses: the shop girl, who had been out of the house; the old watchman who sounds about as reliable as any old watchman of the area can be expected to be; the neighbor Murray who discovered the bodies.”
“Yes, sir. Murray seems the surest of them. The girl was still hysterical when I left her, and the watchman had clearly been drunk.”
“Yes. As I say, as one would expect from a watchman.”
“And then there’s this story from Pennington Street.”
“Yes. Reports of a gang of men running out of an empty house.”
“Yes, sir. The witness concerned states that he heard men running out of the house. If they were the perpetrators, they could have left the house via the back, run through the square, and come back through the empty house.”
“And the clues within the house itself are simply this . . . instrument here. And a ripping chisel.”
“Yes, sir. But the chisel is clean. I don’t see how it could have been used in the murders, although its very presence is rather perplexing. The babe’s throat was clearly cut with a knife, and we found no knife. The maul was in an upstairs room, away from the bodies. It had been left leaning against the wall. As if someone had put it down while doing something else, and then forgot about it in the rush to escape.”
Not for the first time, Harriott feels uneasy at the process of Constable Horton’s deductive reasoning. The man’s imagining of the scene is something he will never get used to. Harriott is a man who needs action and interrogation and movement. This fantasizing of the event makes him profoundly uncomfortable.
This decides him.
“I’m going to visit the house.”
“As you wish, sir.”
“Make sure the maul is guarded, Horton. We will in all probability have to deliver it up to those fools at Shadwell before the end of the day. But let’s see if we can’t make some progress on this before they get their fingers on it.”
Harriott leaves Constable Horton inspecting the maul. He grabs his hat and greatcoat and walks out of the River Police Office onto Wapping Street. Warehouses tower on either side of him as he walks east. The streets have changed character since Horton walked them a few hours previously. There is still detritus from the night-folk, but these desperate individuals have mainly given way to working people, scurrying to the dock, to the river, to the shops and boardinghouses and workshops and warehouses in Wapping and beyond, even on the Lord’s day. Some of them look like they are heading for church, most likely the recently built St. John’s, which nestles up against the south side of the dock. There is a pervading stench from an open sewage ditch which empties into the Thames; its odor settles onto everything. Nonetheless, in the years since the River Police Office opened, Harriott has become comfortable with the air here. It has something of the feel of his drowned island farm in Essex, the one that nearly bankrupted him when it gave way to the sea. Wapping itself had been saved from the sea during Elizabeth’s reign by a clever Dutchman, Cornelius Vanderdelf, who’d built a mile-long wall around the riverbank
and had, eventually, turned the old marsh into rich meadowland. Harriott had enjoyed the historical circularity of that when he discovered it. He seems to be attracted to reclaimed land.
He passes shops and boardinghouses, brass instruments glinting in windows next to elaborate foodstuffs and alien oilskin clothing. And alehouses. Alehouses everywhere. Behind him is the Town of Ramsgate, where the old hanging judge Jeffreys popped in for a drink in 1688 on his way out of the country. The mob surrounded him, and got him back to the Tower to die. Death and beer always hang heavy in the air in Wapping.
Then there is the inn that had been called the Devil’s Tavern, now called the Prospect of Whitby after the ship permanently moored outside. Harriott himself has supped in there with his Freemasonry friends, who’d told him of their introduction of Samuel Johnson to Freemasonry in that very spot, where he’d joined the Dundee Lodge.
And hulking over the whole area, visible through gaps in the buildings like a canvas on which Wapping has been painted, the walls of the new dock and its surrounding warehouses. As an Englishman and a professional, Harriott had greatly approved of the general project for improvement which the dock represents. He had defended it to all, even to his wife Elizabeth, who had been concerned about the poor people who had been forced from the area to make way for the construction. “Nonsense my dear,” Harriott had said, at dinner more than a decade ago, a glass of port in his hand and a table of guests hanging on his words. “The dock represents the triumph of trade and commerce, and as a failed farmer, soldier, and sailor, I warmly welcome the opportunity it brings to fail at something else!” At which there had been general chuckling, approbation, and applause.
But even Harriott must admit that there is something massively dark about the dock, something of the gaol about its walls and the warehouses between it and the river, buildings which now glower over the High Street, each of them a good story or more higher than the older buildings which cluster around the walls like supplicants at a cathedral. The dock is so enormous that it has effectively squeezed Wapping in against the river, with only a few streets now connecting the residents left behind with the rest of London. Wapping has itself been imprisoned by the same trade that gives it succor.
There is a little cluster of freshly minted housing, much of it still under construction, around the Pier Head entrance to the dock, genteel but in keeping with the new brick splendor of the development, and this is where Harriott has made his new home, within a polite little community of wealthy merchants and pillars of the community perched between river, dock, and the ratholes of Wapping proper.
He turns back to look toward this new development, to where even now Elizabeth will be stirring for a new day, and sees the sight which never fails to catch his breath. A ship is entering the dock, and from here it looks like it is being wheeled through the streets, its masts sailing over the heads of the buildings, a ghostly mass creeping, apparently silently, through the noxious streets. He turns around again and continues his walk.
Following the same route as Horton before him, from Wapping Street he turns left up into Old Gravel Lane, a twisting, crowded tunnel of a place, made even more crowded by the clearing of buildings on either side of it to make space for the dock. At the end of the lane, running east to west, is the Highway.
The Ratcliffe Highway is a chattering river of people, even this early on a Sunday morning. The new lick of paint on many of the houses built after the fire can’t hide the dirty underbelly of the place. For every respectable-looking shop window there are three or four bitter-looking women with painted faces and suggestive clothes standing around. For every one of these molls, there are three or four dark, dirty-looking men standing in the shadows of the buildings, eyeing the staggering sailors and dockers who, even in the early morning, are raging with gin and porter, their pockets jingling with change just waiting to be transferred to new ownership.
Harriott has not walked down this part of the Highway in some time. When he walks anywhere, it’s normally along the Wapping curve of the river, which has the Tower at one end and Limehouse at the other. The Highway, which joins those two points in a straight line to the north and thus defines the bow of Wapping, is not his domain. It is the responsibility of the three Shadwell magistrates, gentlemen who have done little to earn Harriott’s good opinion or to demonstrate that they can effectively police this thumping, multifarious ribbon of commerce and human vice.
As Resident Magistrate of the River Police Office at Wapping, Harriott’s attention is directed out toward the river rather than inland. The River Police Office is his creation; he founded it in 1798 as an independent public service, and as a means of convincing the government of the need for such a thing. Pilfering and worse was damaging the river trade, but Harriott’s new independent creation was such a success in securing trade on the river that it only took a few months before the bewigged gentlemen of Whitehall were finally persuaded that the river trade needed official supervision, and the office became fully integrated as one of the new magistrate’s offices.
There remains an intense squeamishness among Their Honorables that Trade, not Land, is making Britain Great, but even among the landed gentry a large number with plenty of zeros gets attention. Harriott’s office is now responsible for ensuring that the hundreds of thousands of pounds sterling which is traded between ship and shore on the river has some measure of protection. The government wrings its hands over the more general policing of London, lest it be accused of aping Bonaparte with a centralized force to keep the general peace. But the good old British love of individual liberty, even in the face of criminal anarchy, ceases to apply on the river. The river is money and it is trade, and if there is one thing London has learned in the centuries since the Romans decided to build a fort on a small hill surrounded by a muddy, meandering river, it is that money and trade will triumph over liberty any day of the week. Even Sunday.
So now Harriott looks upon the Highway with the eyes of someone who has brought a semblance of order to his own patch of authority, on the other side of the dock. The morning air has revived him, and out here among the crowds the memory of the frightful instrument of death can be pushed away. Here, all around, are the kind of villains Harriott is familiar with. He sees, as he always does when out walking, a population of criminals and ne’er-do-wells, all with an eye on the main chance and a hand in someone else’s pocket. He sees trade, no doubt, but it is a species of trade which a man like Harriott—navy midshipman, East India Company lieutenant, farmer, inventor, magistrate—can only hold in contempt.
The crowd thickens as he approaches the draper’s shop at number 29. He elbows his way through to the front almost nonchalantly, happy with the throng of bodies, passing through with a sailor’s steadiness of feet and singleness of purpose, even with a virtually lame leg. The shop he can see as he gets closer to it is one of the new breed of Highway properties: clean, respectable, the ambition and diligence of its owner clear in the new wood around the window and the freshly painted door. On normal days, when there were not horrors concealed inside, he imagines the place would be cheerful and businesslike. Not today.
He barks at a pair of officers who are attending the door, who do not recognize his face but jump to attention when they hear him bellow his name. “Magistrate John Harriott” are still words that thunder with some authority among the new lawkeepers of east London. They open the door for him, and he goes in.
There is a sepulchral air inside. The shutters have remained up, to keep out the prying eyes of the mob, so inside it is dark. A tall, heron-like figure is standing with a candle in the main area of the shop, just in front of the counter. The figure turns its face to him, and the candle lights up its cold features. A face like a rat sucking on a piece of lemon, Harriott has often thought, belonging to George Story, the senior magistrate at the Shadwell office. So they are finally here. The old man visibly winces when he sees Harriott.
“Ah,” he says. “You.” His voice sounds like a man breathing d
own a pipe.
Harriott stays at the door. He feels he should be invited in, now that Story is here, but neither man speaks for a moment. Eventually, that breathing sound again, and with a sigh Story beckons him in.
“You should see the bodies,” says Story. “Look.”
He moves his candle and there, on the shop floor, lies the body of a man.
“Marr,” says Story. “The head of this doomed household.”
The flickering candle casts dancing shadows over Marr’s ruined face, before Story brings the candle back up toward himself and Marr is cast back into darkness.
“I think it would be superfluous to say I have never seen anything like this, Harriott. But I will say it nevertheless. The Highway is a lawless place, an awful place. It has killed this respectable man. It has taken his entire family.”
Harriott still holds his own counsel, resisting the urge to point out who is responsible for constraining the “lawlessness” of the Highway. He tries to look around, the image of Marr’s face like a fresh wound in his mind. How can he get hold of a damned candle?
Story, meanwhile, is embarking on a soliloquy. The candle hops up and down in the gloom as he emphasizes his words, as if standing at a lectern.
“I have been a Shadwell magistrate since 1792, Harriott.” The breathiness has left his voice as he picks up momentum. Old Story is fond of a monologue. “In 1792, none of us had even heard of Napoleon Bonaparte. The French king was still alive. Our king had not yet been overtaken by his terrible illness of the mind and Mr. Pitt was in the business of bringing order to this great nation. But since then we have slid back, Harriott. Slid back to barbarism. The war has turned us into a nation of savages, sick with bloodlust and greed. The king is mad again. It is the end of days, Harriott, the end of days. These murders are only a sign.”
Harriott ignores the older magistrate, as most men are wont to do when he is like this, and is hunting for a candle. He finds one on the counter and takes the candle from the other man’s hand in order to light his own. Story barely seems to notice.
The English Monster Page 5